Chapter Text
Aloy's carried hurt like a dull bruise all her life.
Stitched just beneath her ribs and aching every time she pulls in a breath. Sometimes the bruise fades, and she can feel herself buoyed by a sense of hope that is not her own. Sometimes the loneliness is all she knows, echoed back to her again and again.
She had asked Rost about it, once, and he had simply sighed. Had quietly admitted something about "the bond", of how it kept her tethered to another person, to feel their joys, to feel their pains.
She has no clue who is on the other side of this line, this thread tied between them and binding them to one another, but she knows the shape of their hurt. Knows the way that it slots just beneath her ribs, in a mirrored space to where she carries her own pains.
At times, she carries both of them, twin aches pressing up against her lungs.
Other times, she can feel their light, their determination, the ease at which they exist within their own life.
Sometimes, she can't help but wonder what her bond thinks of her—what they feel from her. Sometimes, she lies awake in the dead of night, fingers drifting restlessly down an ache she knows isn't hers this time, and wonders if they carry her own pain, too.
Aloy holds her hand to the ache under her ribs, and wonder where her hurt is written under their skin.
She's got so much of it these days, her own loneliness amplified like the echo of a forbidden ruin of the old ones, as if somewhere, wherever they might be, her bond also feels as if they are alone.
Are they an Outcast too? Are they a stranger in their own home? It feels as if that way—such a sense of being lost, of being untethered, of existing on the outskirts—that it must be true.
So maybe they're a little bit like her, somehow, somewhere.
Maybe fate was kind enough to give her someone who understood what it felt like to be alone.
Aloy shift onto her side, curling into the ache like it is the ghost of an embrace that she has never before received, and tries to press comfort outwards as she breathes.
She has no clue where they feel her—if they even feel her at all, but something about the ache seems to dull, and Aloy slips off into sleep with the softest press of a smile upon her lips.
-
The ache on her left side starts to fade.
Wherever they are, they are happy now. The loneliness is not so deep, the chasm not so wide.
Aloy tries not to be jealous. She really does. But there is some part of her that—illogically—feels betrayed. It was just the two of them, her and the other half of her heart, familiar in their loneliness together.
And now they feel as if they have found a home, comfort spilling out of them and into her, and Aloy has grown to hate the taste of it upon her tongue, bitter in its sweetness.
It isn't fair. It isn't fair.
Because she's still here. An Outcast.
Alone.
If Rost questions her foul moods, he doesn't speak it. Her pushes her harder, to train longer, to move faster, to be better, Aloy.
There's just over a year left before the Proving. They can see the other young Nora out training sometimes, see them moving in packs of bright voices and tired instructors keeping them in line.
Rost teaches Aloy to give them a wide berth. Then he teachers her how to follow them silently, and they pick apart the techniques of each one, discussing their mistakes, what moves she would have made, and more than anything—
How to beat them.
The ache on her right side is this desperate, gnawing thing now. Some nights it feels as if it might swallow her whole, and Aloy curls tighter into herself, burying all of her hurt, all of her frustration, all of her fears deeper and deeper into it.
That's the thing about an bottomless hole—Aloy can hide everything in it, press it all deeper and deeper, and pray that if she does it long enough, she won't feel anything anymore.
"I wish things were different," she whispers one night, and there are tears that she hates stinging in her eyes. There isn't anyone to hear her, just the sound of her own voice being echoed back across the dark.
Sometimes she can feel them. That pressure on her left side, and its a whole mix of things that she's never felt before in her life. She would almost call it comfort, if it wasn't for the fact that she hates every second of it.
The worst nights are the ones where worry spills through. Worry is prickly—it tastes like thunder off on the horizon, on snapped pine needles and sap sticking to her skin. And their worry is sharper still, to wind its way through the bond and burrow itself up like thorns against her spine.
Maybe they're worried about her.
Maybe they just have their own life to worry about.
Aloy has no clue which one she wishes was more true.
-
Rost dies.
Some twisted, bitter part of herself hopes that they feel this too. That they feel the knife-sharp realization cutting across her throat, burned into her mind, broken across her lungs.
She's alone now. Well and truly alone, and there is nothing that anyone else can do for her now.
Not Rost. Not herself. Not some nameless, faceless bond, existing on some plane that might as well be death for how far away they seem in this moment.
Aloy gives into the ache. She is more bruise than she is person, now. More scar than she is skin. Her body is like a map—and she can trace each loss and moment that she has almost died across it—a map etched in arrow tips and blood.
She doesn't feel her bond as much anymore. Maybe they got tired of trying to press hope against her heart, got tired of her shoving their Goddess-forsaken comforts away.
Or maybe the pit inside of her yawned too wide, and they died inside of it too, and she didn't even realize.
All Aloy can feel is her own hurts.
And after a while, she stops feeling those too.
-
She's not entirely sure when it happens, exactly.
When she can feel them again. When she can feel her own self—all of it in startling presence. For months, it had felt as if she was underwater, and all that was left was the burning in her lungs, desperate for air, desperate not to die.
The desperation hasn't stopped, but the burning has changed. It's something softer now, something that keeps her warm in the mornings as she wakes alone.
It's for the better that she had left after the Alight, that she had started off on her own again. She always had been alone before—and it was safer this way.
Kept them safe, so she couldn't lose anyone more.
And night, Aloy lies there, and realizes that the ache is back in her left side, and she can finally feel them again.
They don't try to comfort her. They don't try to twist false sensations underneath her skin. They simply… sit there. With the bitter bruise ache that is just as it used to be, and Aloy breaks into a sob from the memory of it all.
Aloy buries herself into the bruise, takes it up in trembling hands, and lets it wrap around her, a comfort in its own right, a familiarity in its pain.
She isn't alone.
She isn't alone.
And the ache wraps sturdy arms around her, soothing down her shaking breaths, and Aloy knows, unequivocally.
For all that fate has been cruel, this is its kindest repayment to her for its misdeeds.
That for all that she might know loneliness, it has given her someone who also knows what it means to be alone.
-
The Embassy is coming up, and there's a nervousness that Aloy knows isn't her own.
Nervousness feels different coming from their hands. It tightens itself at her shoulders, when she knows her own anxiety lies in the headache pounding behind her skull.
So this is theirs, and not hers, as Aloy rolls out her shoulders against kinks she knows she can never truly fix on her own.
There's something else, too. Something deeper, something faint, something that only hurts if Aloy presses upon it.
It's loss, in a way.
Not quite loneliness. Not yet. But the start of it. That first drip of rain breaking from the sky. The first frost catching on the leaves, heralding the coming of the winter.
Aloy softens it, soothes it between two cradled hands, as if they could feel the sensation of her skin pressing away the worst of the faint aches.
But she also has her own path to follow. And all she has left is her determination to bolster her, to send her further west, and the familiar bruise that reminds her that even now—she is not alone.
She wonders of her bond, still.
She wonders if they can feel the hope fluttering like a bird in the place of her heart, as the Embassy lies just on the other side of one sleepless night.
One night more—and she'll be one step closer to becoming all that she was made for.
-
It gets worse after the embassy.
The dull ache behind her ribs turns into this twisted, gnarled thing that wraps itself around her lungs and keeps her up at night.
She cannot breathe from the weight of it, staring up at cloudless skies and underneath the crushing pressure on her chest.
It feels as if she's slipping. Stuck on the edge of a cliff and the stone crumbling beneath her feet, her body burning as it strains to hold herself upright even still.
She tells Varl it's just exhaustion. She tells Zo it's just the injuries she had taken, that everything will be fine.
But its different. It's heavier, weightier, and something she knows that will not knit itself back together like broken ribs.
This ache is not her own, and there is no way that she can fix it.
She wonders if this is what it had felt like for them, before. When the darkness had almost taken her, when apathy had eaten even the worst of her pains and left her with nothing but ghosts.
So Aloy takes all of their hurt, all of their anger, all of their brittle broken thoughts, and wraps it tight around her heart, tucking it all into the most secure place that she can.
They may be slipping—but she refuses to let them fall alone.
-
Stone Crest.
And suddenly, it all makes sense.
It had been a careless touch, an impulsive move, but she had been too tired to stop herself. She's always tired these days—kept awake by the grief that seems set on splintering itself through her stomach, jerked out sleep by that pressure against her lungs again and again.
She'll blame it on the lack of sleep.
Maybe it was for the better, that she hadn't tried to pull away.
Because the Marshal who survived is just in front of her, and she does not have to be his bond to feel the seething anger rolling off of him. But she also does not have time to placate his frustration.
He begins to move, and Aloy moves as well, wrapping her hand around his arm in order to stop him from walking away from her—
The dull ache in her chest explodes into a crippling storm.
Fury, a maelstrom of dark clouds and despair streaking up her throat. Fear and isolation knotting itself up across her shoulders, all of her muscles suddenly going tight. Desperation, kicking low into the hollow of her gut.
It is not reserved to only the left of her chest, now. It is a fully body shock, a savage blow to the stomach. It is the hiss of smoke inside her lungs, the burn of hot metal against her skin, the tear of bone and flesh, and suddenly, Aloy feels every hurt as if it is her own—and it might as well be from the way that it crashes into her now.
A tear streaks down her face, unbidden, unnoticed, as she finally meets the gaze of the one whose burdens she has now just taken upon her shoulders.
She has carried his loneliness for so long before, she is not certain how she had not seen it within his the moment that he had looked at her.
But now, in this moment, in his eyes, she can see him break as he recognizes her pain as well.
Fate had been so cruel to them both, through all these bitter years.
Or maybe this is the least of fate's kindnesses that they have earned, to find each other now.